On January 7, 1839, Daguerre first publicly presented the light image on the resulting silver plates. It is believed that it was on this day that photography was created, the creation of an image using optics and chemistry.

Immediately after the creation of photography, the main problem arises: the relationship between photography and art. On this occasion, the famous French painter Paula Delaroche sends a letter to the Paris Academy of Sciences, where he emphasizes the possibilities that photography opens up for art. He also writes: «Painting died from this day.» The German artistic «Kunstblant magazine» expressed an opposite opinion, writing: ‹‹ In general, the exposure of a photograph is of great importance for science, but it is of limited importance for painting.

On the occasion of the first photos, Alphonse de Lamartine said: <>.
Contemporaries of the first portrait and landscape photographs made with daguerreotypes appreciated them as artistic images. This led to quite different and extreme opinions of painters, sculptors, journalists and critics. The collision of photography with «traditional» arts was quite sharp.

Arguments date back to the creation of the earliest photographs and have been about whether photography should be classified as an art or not. At the beginning of 1910, in St. Petersburg, «Artistic Newspaper» wrote: «As for the portraits made before the daguerreotype, it seems useless to us». The proliferation of portrait photography soon reduced orders for oil, watercolor, or graphic portraits, which put painters in a difficult position.
Aesthetics initially did not assign any artistic value to the photograph. The German scientist Friedrich Theodor Fischer, expressing the problems of the mythology of art, also referred to photography. He mentions it in the work «Aesthetics or Science of the Beautiful». Dividing art into painting, music and poetry sections, he also includes photography among the painted arts, but considering it an imitative art.

Gautier, a supporter of «high» arts, assigned the role of a fine art assistant in the painter’s studio to photography. But in any case noted the effectiveness and did not deny its role.
In various countries, photography began to be accepted as a secondary art that helps painting or graphics. European painters used photographs as sketches. French painter Oras Vernet traveled with a camera obscura and made sketches for his later paintings. It is true that critics also saw the negative side in this. The famous Russian art historian Alpatov writes in his book «Imagination in painting». «Since many saw in photography a mechanical exact representation of visible things, it set a bad example for painters of the century.»

At the end of the 19th century, the «relationship» between photography and the arts became more complicated. Determining the photograph’s place in culture is raising a new wave of interest among artists.
The well-known art theorist Hippolyte Ten gave an academic impartial assessment, summarizing the first decade of that «confrontation». «A photograph is an art that is created from the cooperation of lines and shadows, depicting more accurately the shape of this or that object. Undoubtedly, photography is a very useful method for painting, sometimes it acquires an artistic meaning in the hands of experienced and capable people, but still, it does not claim to be on the same level as painting.
but the assessment of photography, even with painting, was not so clear-cut. This way of painting, which was somehow subject to technique, sometimes irritated, sometimes disturbed, and sometimes thought-provoking to the painters of the time, the teachers educating the new artists, as well as other artists and art critics.

During this period, debates about the interaction of the arts and photography were at their peak in Europe. But that was the period when photography already demanded some respect for itself.
Famous and unknown artists of the time used photographs in the development of their art. The use of photography was not always accepted by art critics, so sometimes artists hid their connection with photography. The famous artists of the time, Edgar Degas, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Toulouse Lautrec, and others, accepted the influence of photography on them in a certain way. Many of them also practiced photography in parallel.
Edgar Degas had a great influence on the art of photographer-painters with his art. We will consider Degas’ art in detail in the next chapter of our work.

The famous painter Paul Gauguin was one of those people of the time who was ambivalent about photography, but nevertheless approached it with some reservations. He admitted that the influence of the photograph on the painting was inevitable. Gauguin believed that with the creation of the photograph, the image became faster, lighter and clearer. But he is known to have used photography anyway. On his second trip to Tahiti, he used photographs of native women for his paintings.
These are the facts. In the mid-to-late 19th century, painters of various genres and styles did not bypass photography if it was useful in their work. However, many artists rejected photographs taken especially in motion, considering them unaesthetic. The artists did not want to consider too many «evidences» of the photo. Painters and graphic artists, as a rule, synthesized two movements in the pictures, thereby creating a figurative representation of a moving object, generalizing the theory of movement.

We know the position of the famous sculptor Auguste Rodin on this matter. He found that figures photographed in motion looked absurd, as if their body parts had simply stopped for a few moments. Rodin believed that when modern painters used snapshot positions, such as galloping horses, that was when they sealed their verdict. According to Rodin, the artist can depart from the truth of the phenomenon, but he nevertheless, seeing the whole path of art, accepted the accuracy of the photograph. Roden wrote: «The painter is right and the photographer is lying, because in reality time does not stop». All this, however, did not prevent him from getting close to the famous American photographer Alfred Stiglitz, who was the first to introduce Rodin’s art to the public of the United States. he organized the latter’s exhibition in his homeland. Eduard Steichen, a follower of Stilgitz, created one of Rodin’s most successful photographs, in which he stands in the background of his works.